Rodney nearly caught Gneisenau

Rodney found Gneisenau while the German ship was recovering survivors and forced her to accelerate from low speed. The older British battleship continued gaining until roughly 26 knots, after which Gneisenau finally opened the range. Possible explanations for Rodney's unexpected speed include hard-driven machinery, skilled engineering, and deliberately conservative published performance figures. The exact cause remains uncertain, but the chase raises questions about how literally treaty-era performance data should be read. Water used as protection could be reported as feed water and excluded from standard displacement, unlike steel armour, allowing a design to follow a treaty's letter while exploiting its accounting definitions.